Wednesday, 26 August 2009

GamesCom: Online-Welten Interview with Rich Vogel

The German site Online-Welten has an interview (in English, German also available) with Rich Vogel, Vice President and Co-Studio Director for Bioware. Here's an excerpt:
SWTOR-Welten: What's about combat? Could you tell us more about Combat? Will there be combos „like u can only use this one after this one“?

Rich Vogel: As you grow there'll be combinations what you can do. As you can see the combat is very action oriented, right. That's what we trying to do here, were trying to make it very visual. Very... you know you can feel being knock backed you can feel you are knocking someone else back. Its kinda cool.

SWTOR-Welten: Can you say anything about player companions?

Rich Vogel: We will have companions in the game, every bioware game has companions, they’re not pets, they’re companions. They're will actually help you, assist you. And you know when you're progress you will get a companion as a reward. So you will definitely have different companions to work with. We haven't really talked about it more.
Like most interviews with Bioware it seems like he's saying "we're not talking about that" to most questions, but he does answer a few and one can try to glean some information from between the lines (like how he emphasizes that Companions aren't pets could mean that there's a pet class, or at least override people's objections saying "why have a pet class if everyone already has a pet").

But similarly there's some worrying details in there as well. Most particularly how character creation is very similar to WoW (which has probably the worst character creation I've ever seen in an MMO). But similarly there's some rays of hope as well, particularly how the character models are still very early and are still being worked on (I still feel that the character models look hideous and disproportioned).

I'll report more articles as I come across them.


[link] to the Online-Welten interview.

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